Wednesday, December 24, 2008

First off: Merry Christmas! I hope you are all enjoying yourselves, and not drinking yourselves into oblivion because this comic has brought you more despair than you can handle this holiday season. As my Christmas gift to you, I present you: It's A Wonderful Webcomic, a short story by yours truly.

Randall Munroe was a webcomic, authoring a niche comic that was increasingly less funny. Desperately, he tried to insert geeky references into his works, trying to service as many fans as possible in attempt to save his comic from the dark oblivion. Then, disaster struck. Christmas approached. He was unable to decide on a single internet-based joke for Christmas, and he didn't have time for a whole Christmas story!

Even if he did, his ideas had grown too disparate, too crazy to connect in a coherent plot. He needed a plan. So, late at night, Randall Munroe went out into the lonely bars of Cambridge, drank, and doodled on napkins. He was getting nowhere. He was doomed to write a comic that did not inspire vapid comments on his forums.

His pen broke. Ink started filling one of the panels--one where he had drawn the waitress telling him how she wanted to go ice skating on the Charles river. The resulting comic made no sense--and it was perfect. He immediately thought of a suitably nerdy pattern with which to black out the panels. He told the waitress he loved her, and ran home to write his Christmas special. He could make 12 panels look like 32! He could make the story completely nonsensical, just nerd reference after nerd reference, and everyone would think that was part of the genius!

It was the best Christmas ever. THE END. Happy holidays, loyal fans.

UPDATE: I am going to just make a list of better Christmas comics than this one. Feel free to suggest your own and I will add them, unless they suck, in which case I will cry.

COMIC THE FIRST: A Softer World - Oh, A Softer World. I love you.COMIC THE SECOND: Cat and Girl - A++ would buy againCOMIC THE THIRD: Kate Beaton - As of this writing, the most recent one. Scroll down until there is Santa.COMIC THE FOURTH: Nedroid

UPDATE AGAIN, INDEPENDENT OF THE FIRST UPDATE: ugh I forgot to complain. Randall. It is not 'the yggdrasil'. It is Yggdrasil. Just Yggdrasil. You are DOING IT WRONG.

STILL FURTHER UPDATE, RELATED TO THE SECOND UPDATE BECAUSE THAT STILL BOTHERS ME: Yggdrasil means "Ygg's Horse." Ygg means Odin. The Odin's Horse makes no sense. RANDALL FAIL.

Oh man this comic was so sad. "Oh man i have the best excuse for putting random stuff together! I don't have to think of anything logical! wooooo" and of course he gets to add the totally unneeded prime number thing into it, just to show that he knows about math!

It seems like there is stuff that we miss in between panels 2 and 3, also. He clearly just made some random story and didn't think about the logic of it.

Fun fact: this is the original version of this comic - you'll note that it has one row fewer than the current version, and that panel 27 (ie, panel 3*9) has a part of the story. And so Merry Christmas was at the bottom separate from the story. So, he realized his mistake, added another row, and because he also needed panel 31, made Merry Christmas part of the story. And added the happy couple because xkcd is a comic about romance, after all!

DoubleBlackbird - Man I love Achewood but this week has been even more depressing than usual. Good god. Those are some good links, though.

It's christmas, everybody! :) When is nostalgia and self-reference as acceptable as it is during christmas. Some random references is all I want on christmas eve. Nothing exceptionally clever, just simple fun. I actually do enjoy that "screw you"-mentality shown by not caring that the Merry Christmas wish isn't in the last panel.

Escalating stories seams to be a new xkcd theme (349, 445, 456, 475, 518 and today, at least). I enjoy them all, except 445.

God thank you. I found this blog googling about the Yggdrasil thing to make sure I wasn't crazy. The etymology is honestly kind of irrelevant, though -- what is relevant is that it is a NAME, not a description, and names of that kind just don't take definite articles in English. In any case, wtfwtfwtf.

First Anonymous: Your friends are idiots. (As are you.) Tell them I said so. Show them the post, if necessary. Tell them I want to hear from them. I want to teach them how not to be idiots. Please send them to me.

But perhaps you should develop some basic literacy. Yggdrasil means 'Odin's horse.' I did not say it was a horse, merely stated the etymology. Yggdrasil means 'Odin's horse.' I do not bother myself with what some idiot wannabe pagans think it means, I am more concerned with etymology. Yes, it is the world tree. Yes, I know it is not actually Odin's horse. But do your fucking homework before you try to go all elitist.

Second Anonymous: Yeah, for a nerd Randall sure dropped the ball on this one.

oh man you are SO. IGNORANT. Cuddlefish #1 is going to have his friends CAST VIKING SPELLS on you. They will have a fairy revel and he will wear a costume of LINK from THE LEGENDS OF ZELDA and he has a real athame and can draw a REAL RITUAL CIRCLE with it, and the Vikings will totally hang you from a tree as a sacrifice to ODIN.

Commenting far too late to be relevant, but I only found this blog this week and have been catching up on the archives.

What bothered me the most about this comic was the (once again) unnecessary introduction text ("Due to the slowing economy...").

It isn't even internally coherent as a joke. How would the economy prevent Randall, I'm sorry Randall & Co. as indicated by the "we", from posting the complete comic, let alone, just prime numbered panels. It is a cheap justification to throw in a cheap throw-away geek reference.

Let me put it this way:In the novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, the main character, Christopher, who is autistic and the fictional author of the book, has chosen to use prime numbers only as chapter numbers. It is part of the over-all texture of the book and character, justified because it is written by someone who is autistic.

I think Randall means us to take the blacked out panels in the same way, just part of the over-all texture of xkcd. But why then try to excuse it with a lame and non-sensical "due to the economy". Oh yeah, because as you have pointed out over and over again, he sure is on top of those gosh-darned wacky current events.

As a montage of xkcd in-jokes and wacky unrelated scenarios, it is sub-par, but it he has already told us that that we're not going to see the rest of the comic and we can fucking assume that what we will see will be oh so wacky and inexplicable and... Jesus, he has really just stopped trying. He couldn't even throw in a smarmy I love this comic and reiterating the same jokes over and over again. Instead our Christmas present was a great big:

... Norse. Mythology.I'm a fan of this site - sometimes. You raise some valid concerns about xkcd that have changed my perception of it - but you WHINE and BITCH so much. It's a webcomic. Its not perfect. You complain so often that "Oh noez, randall only works 3 times a week to write a load of crap." How is that so different from what you do? You write 3 times a week about how you think someone else is doing a crap job. You made a good effort to redeem yourself with xkcdcouldbebetter, even though I didn't really enjoy that so much.

What I'm saying is that I like this site. I like what you do here. But do not be a jerk. Don't say "Yggdrasil means 'Ygg's Horse.' Ygg means Odin. The Odin's Horse makes no sense. RANDALL FAIL." if you don't know what Yggdrasil is. Okay, i'm fine with this at first - you made a mistake. But when people point it out, ADMIT IT. Don't bitch more and insult people more because you were too much of an idiot to actually look it up.

If you were literate you might notice that I do, in fact, know what Yggdrasil is, and am, in fact, referring to the fucking etymology of the word--as any dictionary or encyclopedia will tell you. But you aren't literate, so I will leave you to figure out "literacy," and give you this parting comment:

You are a fucking imbecile and an affront to the human race. Your death will be unmourned, and you will be forever unloved.

Yeah I know. I have high hopes that he will come back in another four months and say something else stupid! Should I start ignoring them? (then how will i ever have amanda tell me about her hotdog/rob-related fantasies?)

Oh fuck. Sorry Rob - i misread your earlier comment. When you said "I do not bother myself with what some idiot wannabe pagans think it means," even though that was a jerk thing to say, I thought you were saying that, "No! I don't care what's true! I'm gonna say its damn Odin's horse cause i want to be right! *cry*." Honest mistake, sorry.

(although, if you do know what Yggdrasil is, the least you can do is not insult Randall just because the etymology means something different than the actual word meaning itself)

"You are a fucking imbecile and an affront to the human race. Your death will be unmourned, and you will be forever unloved.":'(.

Still, Randy does not know how to use proper nouns. It is very infuriating. It's like saying "The Boston Common" or "The Harvard Yard" or "The Pike Place" or "The Park Slope" or etc. I mean, there are proper nouns that take definite articles but Yggdrasil is not one of them.

Grr, i'm trying to figure out how i found this blog. I've narrowed it down to first finding it on April 10... I think. But unfortunately firefox's history section doesn't show chronologically, but alphabetically. Oh wait, found out how to sort.... but unfortunately, sites i have visited more thna once disappear from earlier in the list. =\ \=.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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